Archive: Feb 2009

Unex­pect­edly, my wife and I are back in the mar­ket for another new car and we are try­ing again to buy a GM vehi­cle. Unfor­tu­nately, just like last month we can’t seem to pull it off. We want to buy a Cadil­lac CTS but we can’t get a dealer to honor their adver­tised price. Some­times […] [read full story]

In my post­ing last Fri­day with Mark Sun­shine, TARP Isn’t Work­ing For Small Busi­nesses; Two Sim­ple Solu­tions For Small Busi­ness Lend­ing, we dis­cussed the severe fund­ing stresses being faced by small and medium sized busi­ness enter­prises (“SMEs”). Unfor­tu­nately, most of the gov­ern­ment aid announced to date does not help in deploy­ing cap­i­tal to SMEs any […] [read full story]

There is more evi­dence that the world is not flat. Richard Florida’s arti­cle in this month’s The Atlantic on how the reces­sion will reshape the econ­omy offers a con­tentious argu­ment about the impor­tance of highly tal­ent peo­ple clus­tered in cer­tain regions: The abil­ity of dif­fer­ent cities and regions to attract highly edu­cated people—or human capital—has […] [read full story]

There are opaque and early signs that the U.S. econ­omy has started the begin­ning of a bot­tom­ing process. Just like a div­ing sub­ma­rine needs to stop its down­ward motion and reach its low­est depth before it can resur­face, the econ­omy needs to go through the steps of slow­ing its decline and sta­bi­liz­ing before it can […] [read full story]

It is amaz­ing that Geithner’s pro­posal to “stress test” banks is mak­ing news as new pol­icy. After all, reg­u­la­tors were sup­posed to be doing this all along. After the last bank­ing cri­sis in the 1980s bank­ing reg­u­la­tors got the author­ity to antic­i­pate cap­i­tal short­falls as well as oper­a­tional defi­cien­cies. When prob­lems are iden­ti­fied reg­u­la­tors are […] [read full story]

A Joint Arti­cle By Mark Sun­shine and Robert Blum Unfor­tu­nately, the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion isn’t propos­ing much to help restart lend­ing to small and medium sized enter­prises (“SMEs”). While SME’s make up the back­bone of the U.S. econ­omy and pro­vide most of its job cre­ation, the credit cri­sis is mak­ing them eco­nomic road kill. SME’s […] [read full story]

With the focus in Wash­ing­ton on bank bailouts and stim­u­lus pack­ages, we have yet to hear about any seri­ous pro­pos­als for new reg­u­la­tions. Nev­er­the­less, they will come, and any­one who thinks that a Pres­i­dent McCain would have treated Wall Street any less harshly than Pres­i­dent Obama must have been asleep dur­ing the Pres­i­den­tial cam­paign. Indeed, […] [read full story]

TARP 1.0 didn’t get lend­ing going and TARP 2.0 won’t be much bet­ter. The prob­lem is that TARP 2.0 con­tin­ues to focus on banks as the pri­mary lend­ing insti­tu­tions despite the fact that banks aren’t the pri­mary source of non-real estate credit for con­sumers or busi­nesses. Most non-real estate lend­ing takes place through the “shadow […] [read full story]

Are these the best of times or the worst of times? Do the sim­ple things in life lift your spir­its or do you strug­gle against the yoke of eco­nomic con­straint. It’s all atti­tude and per­cep­tion. Obvi­ously this isn’t the most seri­ous arti­cle I have ever posted but on an oth­er­wise tough day I hope […] [read full story]

If econ­o­mists are going to add value, they need to change how they do their jobs. Instead of stay­ing in their “Ivory Tow­ers”, econ­o­mists need to mix it up with the “reg­u­lar peo­ple” and do orig­i­nal, fun­da­men­tal, on-the-ground research. And, Las Vegas is where they should be going to gather data. Few econ­o­mists view Las […] [read full story]